The Good Neighbour (2016) (Review)

The Good Neighbor (2016) Plot: A pair of mischievous high school kids create the illusion of a haunting on an unsuspecting elderly neighbor while keeping his every reaction under surveillance. A series of coincidences leads to tragedy.

Film not to be confused with the other Good Neighbor (2022) by Stephan Rick with Luke Kleintank, Eloise Smyth and especially Jonathan Rhys Meyers!I confess: I watched this film fast-forward!!!That said, I managed to grasp the deeper meaning of the film… and I was bluffed.Explanation: It’s a film that surprises with its progressive double reading, its characters’ points of view, its investigative montage and, above all, a daring mix of genres, between thriller, found-footage, teen-movie and sentimental drama, where the viewer goes through many emotions.In fact, the poster is very misleading!In fact, it was the found-footage + teen-movie aspect of the film that kept me from watching it closely. It’s two cinematic sub-genres that completely horrify me from now on. The story: Two teenagers with quasi-professional equipment decide to investigate the neighbor and install cameras in his home to study his reactions to the many “tests” they’re going to put him through. At first, I thought this would be a slightly different sort of “Disturbia”, since here too the characters suspect the neighbor of being a murderer, especially as he spends many hours in the basement, which is the only room not filmed, but no!

Spoilers Alert: Kasra Farahani’s film, though much less effective, is a little out of the ordinary, thanks to a surprising and even touching finale, in which we finally understand the behavior of James Caan’s character. The plot’s construction is classic and contains a few long stretches, but the director manages to keep us on the edge of our seats by adding flashbacks to the old man’s life and, above all, courtroom scenes that cast doubt and make us really want to see how it all ends. “The Good Neighbor”, though sometimes inconsistent and smug in terms of story development, is a good film with a moral that hits the nail on the head. A film that mixes a lot of emotions. Disturbing in some ways, showing the perversity of our society and the use of cameras for nothing. Very difficult to review without spoilers.Not the film of the year or the century, but worth seeing all the same for the emotions it can engender. A must-see! For those whose mouths water after reading my review,

My Rating